Types of Lexical Information: PRONUNCIATION
Dictionaries are written in metalanguage which is a language used to talk about language itself.
One item of metalanguage a dictionary contains is a broad or phonemic transcription of the terms listed in the lexicon database. Phonemic transcriptions provide information about the correct pronunciation of a word, it is written in square brackets.
For example: eddy → visual surface structure
................../‘edi / → pronunciation: another type of surface structure
eddy .............................vs. ............/‘edi /
Orthography ↔ Spelling ....Pronunciation ↔ Phonology
Whereas the idea of written words is relatively stable, speech sounds are often shortened, reduced or left out in order to provide faster speaking.
Nevertheless the precedent example of a phonemic transcription, there are two possibilities of representing speech sounds in dictionaries:
Phonology and phonemics is the study of phonemes, of abstract speech sounds which serve as a symbol, whereas phonetics comprehends the study of phones, meaning concrete speech sounds in concrete utterances.
A PHONEME can be defined as the smallest word distinguishing sign of oral speech.
In Phonetics, each phoneme has got its own INTERNAL STRUCTURE, meaning that different phonemes have got distinctive features concerning their place of articulation, the manner of articulation and a differentialization concerning the dichotomy voiced versus voiceless.
A PHONEME has also got an EXTERNAL STRUCTURE, because it is related to other phonemes with which it forms larger syllables and words. In Phonology, a vowel normally forms the nucleus of a syllable, whereas consonants can be found at the margins of syllables.
Phonemes underlie certain rendering rules such as:
Pronunciation rules (acoustic modality)
Spelling (visual modality)
Sound-spelling rules (inter-modality conversion)
Representation of sounds in dictionaries
Sounds are represented by phonemic symbols and written in IPA. They have got an internal structure (configurations of distinctive features) and an external structure (syllables). Larger combinations of phonemes are called syllables. Syllables also have got an internal and an external structure. Their internal structure can be defined as "configurations of sequential features" (consonantal, vocalic; voiced, unvoiced etc.) and simultaneous features (f.ex.: tone, accent). Their external structure can be defined as a combination of syllables which leads to the construction of words.
The basic English syllable structure is: CCCVVCCC, having vowels as its nucleus an consonants at its margins. Nevertheless the fact that affricates consist of two phonetic parts (a plosive and a fricative) they only count as one phoneme.
Syllable structures can be illustrated in some kind of map that is called transition network or state diagramme. When transcribing words, each phoneme can be integrated in this network and is represented by one circle, node or state. The position of the circle within the diagram describes the correct position of the phoneme within the syllable/ word (f. ex.: for consonants: place of articulation/ position of the tongue or the vocal tract obstruction in general; and for vowels: position of the tongue measured in frontness or backness).
Trying to define the term "PHONEME"
There are several ways of defining phonemes, depending on which of the four sign components the linguist focuses:
THE CONTRASTIVE FUNCTION OF PHONEMES: In this sense, a phoneme can be defined as the smallest word-distinguishing sound segment
THE EXTERNAL SOUND STRUCTURE: A phoneme is the smallest unit of a syllable
THE INTERNAL SOUND STRUCTURE: A phoneme incorporates distinctive features
THE RENDERING OF PHONEMES: Phonemes provide a set of allophones
Description of sounds
As we already said, transcriptions can be phonetic or phonemic. In dictionaries and lexicons word transcriptions are nearly always phonemic because they refer to a broad symbol of how the word normally has to be pronounced in the standard language.
Nevertheless, if the linguist aims at representing actual speech sounds/ speech pronunciation in detail, he can also use a phonetic transcription. Then he enters the field work and considers he knowledge on articulatory phonetics, a branch of phonetics that deals with the production of speech sounds. There are also two other dimensions to the description of speech in phonetics: acoustic phonetics is about how speech waves are transferred from the mouth to the ear by sound waves that travel the air in terms of time, amplitude and frequency and the third branch of auditory phonetics is about how speech sounds are perceived and transformed in the ear (from sound waves in the outer ear to mechanical movements in the middle ear (transformed by: hammer, anvil, stirrup) and to neural signals by passing through the oval window to the cochlea situated in the inner ear.
English and German
English and German are different in pronunciation and spelling rules. There are some phonemes in German that does nor exist in English and vice versa.
Some examples of German VOWELS that do not occur in standard English:
The rounded close-mid back vowel: [o]
The rounded open front vowel: [oe]
The rounded close-mid front vowel: [Ø]
The rounded close/close-mid front vowel: [Y]
Example of an English VOWEL that do not occur in standard German:
The unrounded open-mid/ open vowel: [æ]
Some examples of German CONSONANTS that do not occur in standard English:
The palatal fricative [ç]
The velar fricative [x]
Some examples of English CONSONANTS that do not occur in standard German:
The voiced dental fricative: [ð]
The unvoiced dental fricative: [o ]
Spelling
Nevertheless the fact that the Latin alphabet used in many languages all over the world is originally meant to be phonographic, our spelling often does not have anything to do with how words are really pronounced.
To express the phoneme [∫] for instance, German normally uses the graphical letter combination sch, whereas English uses sh.
There are even some German letters that do not exist in standard English orthography, like the German "Umlaute":
ö, ü and ä and the German "Scharfes S": ß
posted by Melanie Zahn @ 5:47 AM
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